In this report, we take a quick look at the how life expectancy differs between rich and poor countries, and display some of the new interactive data discovery tools we have been working on.

Gender differences in life expectancy at birth

Using the 2015 WDI indicators as the most recent full snapshot of the world economy.

The red dotted line shows an ideal situation of gender parity, where males and females would have an equal life expectancy. Members of both genders would be expected to live for the same amount of time, e.g. 70 years for males (x-axis) and females (y-axis).

The point sizes vary to reflect differences in populations of these countries.

We extracted several insights from the data and its visualization:

To explore these and other cases use zoom and panning in the interactive chart below.


This information provides important context for development professionals. Whether an economist or a policymaker, both can put it to use in the context of their work. Moving forward with this topic, we recommend augmenting the analysis by looking at life expectancy at age 65, similar to the analysis in this paper.

The World Bank staff are here to facilitate the access to development information. In future blog posts, we will be updating our dataviz catalog with new products. If you are interested in exploring development data and downloading it for further analysis, visit World Bank Data to learn more.

Reproducible research: download RMarkdown file.